A recent study from the Lancet found that by the start of the next century, more than half of all births will occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks to higher fertility rates and longer life expectancies, the continent’s population is on track to nearly double to 2.4 billion by 2050, then nearly double again, to 4.2 billion by 2100.

Within Africa, intermediary cities (noncapital cities, typically with a population of 1 million or fewer) are the fastest growing urban places. Between 2022 and 2030, intermediary cities are expected to account for nearly 50 percent of Africa’s overall urban population growth, and this growth will occur largely in cities that currently have fewer than 1 million people. For example, Zinder, the third-largest city in Niger, is expected to more than double its population between 2020 and 2035, growing from about a half-million to over 1 million residents.

The implications of this tremendous growth for people, communities, economies, and the environment are extraordinary, made even more complex by the impacts of climate change and climate migration.

A recent collaboration between the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Challenge Works investigated ways to support effective land use planning, infrastructure investments, land-based financing, and disaster resilience in rapidly growing intermediary cities in Africa. We used a mixed-methods approach that synthesizes literature reviews, interviews with urban policy experts and city officials, and specialist workshops.

We explored:

• the main goals of intermediary cities in Africa when it comes to managing growth;
• the barriers preventing such cities from using data-driven planning, mapping, and land-based financing tools; and
• how a challenge prize could accelerate the creation and scaling of such tools.

Below, we summarize some of the things we learned, and how we plan to take the idea of a challenge prize forward.

Growth is not inherently bad—but can have unintended consequences if not managed.

Often, with population growth comes economic opportunity and improved quality of life. More and better jobs, more economic mobility, and better access to health care, education, and sanitation are among the benefits of population growth.

However, we wanted to dig into questions of land use and infrastructure development knowing that:

• climate vulnerability risks are highest in rapidly growing cities;
• climate change will disproportionately impact people in rapidly urbanizing countries, particularly groups that are already vulnerable;
• the cost of retrofitting infrastructure in informal settlements is three times more expensive than new infrastructure development; and
• with two-thirds of African cities yet to be built, a small window of opportunity exists to make the necessary investments to support future growth patterns based on sustainable and equitable development principles.

Land use planning in intermediary cities is critical to creating more sustainable futures.

In speaking with city leaders and experts within government, NGOs, and industry working in this space, we learned that land use planning has different inputs, outputs, and outcomes. When these are integrated, a virtuous cycle can occur:

• cities can use evidence and insights to inform plans and policies;
• evidence-based, implementable plans that are created with input from diverse stakeholders are more likely to be enforced and lead to better outcomes; and
• this increases the level of trust and evidence available to inform new plans and policies.

The enabling ecosystem—which includes elements like institutional capacity to develop and implement plans, political dynamics, human capacity and skills, funding, cultural norms, and more—also plays an important role in creating and implementing land use plans (or conversely, limiting or obstructing progress).

We also learned that the loop can become ineffective for a number of reasons, which are generally attributed to two primary gaps: first, when effective, evidence-based land use plans are not created, due to organizational barriers (things like internal government silos or lack of planning capacity), political and economic barriers (things like political cycles and competition for resources), and technical barriers (such as lack of quality, up-to-date data); and second, when completed land use plans are not implemented, again due to organizational barriers (like complex land tenure), political and economic barriers (limited authority or resource to implement plans), and technical barriers (lack of local buy-in or weak enforcement powers).

Innovation has the potential to both address pain points within those gaps and strengthen the enabling ecosystem.

For example, we’ve identified city-specific use cases to create context-sensitive solutions that use data analytics to better plan for future mobility needs and transport infrastructure, or to better predict climate risk vulnerabilities and therefore inform land use regulations; apply crowdsourced data and citizen-sensing techniques to create and implement inclusive, equitable land use plans; or examine and collate property registration and valuations to bolster municipal finances and the use of land-based financial tools.

At the ecosystem level, creating new tools or adapting tools to the local context can help organizations leapfrog over traditional planning systems and catalyze new practices, and bring together government agencies or organizations that would not normally collaborate.

Tech solutions can help—but need to be paired with institutional enablers.

While our investigations confirmed the exciting potential for data-driven, digital technologies to help city leaders reduce risk and make more informed decisions, we also learned that new data collection and analysis tools are only as good as the planning and implementation processes they inform. Data-driven tools need to be developed in ways that are people-centered, inclusive, and fair, and are ineffective if they aren’t supported by an enabling ecosystem to implement and update effective plans.

Solutions that pair technical innovation with institutional innovation will enable intermediary cities in Africa to pioneer methods to manage growth in ways that are contextually appropriate and don’t yet exist.

A challenge prize can help spark and scale up solutions.

We propose to run an open innovation challenge in partnership with rapidly growing African intermediary cities. Such a challenge would invite innovators to create, test, and scale solutions to manage rapid growth. The challenge structure is based on partnering with cities to create an open call to innovators, oriented around a specific city use case, which will then work closely with city stakeholders to create custom, locally relevant solutions.

The challenge will include these fundamental features:

• Centering the challenge around opportunities cities want to address. Innovators will respond to challenge statements that reflect the goals cities want to achieve. This is different from, and complementary to, innovation funding approaches that focus on specific technologies or methods.
• Prioritizing scalable and replicable solutions. Our research revealed a number of promising innovations that are already being piloted and implemented in real-world settings. Despite this, scaling solutions remains a barrier. For instance, innovators who have the right data analytics solution may not have access to the permissions needed to test it in the real world, or the relationships to introduce it in places that need innovation. Local governments may not be prepared to adopt and maintain services. The challenge will be designed to address scaling barriers through seed funding, capacity-building, new business models, and access to customers, investors, and networks.
• Providing appropriate incentives and support for innovators to experiment and take risks. The outcome-based, stage-gated funding model of an innovation challenge means that innovators can experiment, while cities can benefit from crowding in a variety of ideas and expertise. Having access to both financial and nonfinancial support enables innovators to develop solutions in ways they might not be able to otherwise.
• Shaping and accelerating innovation in land use planning. By supporting multiple innovators working across multiple use cases and settings, the challenge can accelerate progress in the field of land use planning, as well as steer innovation in a direction more attuned to the needs of rapidly growing cities in low- and middle-income countries.

The time is now.

Africa is both the cradle of civilization and the world’s youngest continent, with half the population under the age of 19. The continent is also facing critical risks related to climate change and associated implications to disaster resilience, food and water security, energy supplies, and more. To ensure that future city growth in Africa is inclusive, equitable, sustainable, and resilient to changing conditions, we urgently need to take action now to accelerate and scale new models to manage growth. Our next steps are to assemble the partners to implement the next stage of the challenge. If you are interested in contributing, get in touch!

With sincere thanks to Stefan Chavez-Norgaard, Teodora Chis, Astrid Haas, Peter Oborn, and the many policy experts, development practitioners, city officials, tech innovators, and others who provided their insights and experiences to shape this program.

Lead image: City market street in Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa. Credit: peeterv via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Housing costs are putting unbearable pressure on household budgets and threatening the American Dream of homeownership. The statistics are sobering. The Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) estimates that 40 million households—half of all renters and a quarter of all homeowners—are cost-burdened. The main culprit is a chronic shortage of new housing production, accumulated over the last 25 years and abetted by other factors including the great financial crisis, the pandemic, and extreme global wealth inequality. Starter homes are vanishing as institutional investors buy up tens of thousands of them each year and convert them from owner-occupancy to rentals.

Estimates of the magnitude of the housing shortage range from 1.5 million to 5.5 million units. Zillow estimates that we need 4.5 million new units for families who are currently doubled up—i.e., multiple households sharing a single residence. The shortage of affordable housing is even more acute. The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that the United States needs 7.3 million more affordable housing units to accommodate extremely low-income renters. No matter how we count it, this amounts to one to five years of new production at current rates.

Suffice it to say we need a lot of new housing. Most of it needs to be affordable. And we need to build it where people want to and need to live.

To do that well, we need to understand how housing markets work. Important new research from the JCHS shows that new housing added in suburbs has almost no effect on adjacent urban markets. The authors suggest that “a more targeted approach is required if policymakers want to reduce costs in the least affordable neighborhoods” and “building more housing will make cities more affordable for low- and middle-income families only if the newly built housing is relatively affordable and located near those families.”

At the Lincoln Institute, we’re all about solutions—and our solutions always start with land. The biggest obstacle to building new affordable housing is the cost of land. The primary reason for our chronic habit of building affordable housing where we don’t need it is cheap land. So any solution to the nation’s housing crisis will have to start by identifying land that meets three important criteria: it is appropriately located, available, and affordable. Interestingly, that isn’t as hard as it might seem.

Where is the land we need, and how much housing could we build on it? Using a novel geospatial analysis called Who Owns America®, the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) at the Lincoln Institute can map and count housing potential with precision. When we began thinking about urban land that is ripe for housing development, publicly owned land emerged as an obvious candidate—places like underused urban parking lots and brownfields.

How much prime buildable land (large parcels in transit-rich urban locations) is owned by various levels of government in the United States? The CGS analysis, detailed in a new report published today, estimates over a quarter million acres.

This includes over 237,000 acres of land owned by local government (cities and counties), nearly 34,000 acres of state-owned land, and about 5,200 acres of federal land. These parcels all have at least 20,000 square feet of developable area with no building larger than 1,000 square feet. CGS’s team of geospatial data experts screened out wetlands, parks and other green space, and rights of way.

This is the lowest-hanging of low-hanging fruit. If we developed these parcels to low-density standards (seven units per acre), we could produce more than 1.9 million housing units. If we got ambitious and built out to higher-density standards of 25 units per acre, government-owned land could yield 6.9 million units of new housing.

Skeptics might argue that this land is not distributed where we need it or where people want to live. Interestingly, the states with the largest amounts of buildable public lands are Florida, Massachusetts, Washington, Texas, and California—home to some of the most expensive housing markets in the country. It is stunning to see that many of the places where we need affordable housing most are the places with significant amounts of public land available for development.

There is an additional portfolio of other opportunities to build housing on nongovernment land. For example, redeveloping underperforming urban and suburban malls and strip malls to higher density multi-use standards. This approach, applied to just 30 percent of the estimated total stock of these shopping centers, could add 3.4 million units of housing nationally. Or consider the emerging “Yes in God’s Back Yard” effort allowing multifamily housing to be built on church-owned land as of right. CGS estimates that churches own more than 32,000 acres in transit-rich urban areas. If developed to the more aggressive transit-oriented development standards (25 units per acre), they would yield more than 800,000 units.

Building on prime land owned by various levels of government and by churches could allow our country to completely overshoot even the highest estimates of what we need to address the housing shortage. This does not even include the new housing potential of redeveloped derelict or underperforming malls, accessory dwelling units, or converting Class B office buildings to residential use. And this would all be additive to the “normal” pace of housing development of about 1.4 million units per year.

These are ballpark estimates, offered to suggest that the housing crisis is not an unassailable challenge. It might be hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible.

So what would it look like to take this challenge on? Maybe we can set a goal of adding 7 million new units to our “normal” rate of housing production in the next 10 years. That would mean building an average of 2.1 million units per year for the next decade. Is it reasonable to think we can ramp up housing production by 50 percent? Sure. We completed 2.1 million units of new housing in 1973 when the economy was about one-quarter the size it is today (as measured by real GDP). In 2006, we produced 1.98 million new units when the economy was a little more than half the size it is today. Thus, ramping up production sufficiently to meet this goal is clearly not out of the realm of possibility.

What we need is a new public-private-civic partnership like the one that built the suburbs and millions of units of affordable urban housing after World War II. Assembling the land is the first step. Next, we’ll need to mobilize the financing. At $400,000 per unit (this is the median price of a new house today according to Redfin; per-unit costs would be lower for more modest homes), we’ll need $2.8 trillion to get the job done—about 1 percent of GDP each year for 10 years. This is about half of what we spent for COVID-19 relief, and a lot of the expenditure will be covered by the private sector and recovered through home sales, rent revenues, and land leases. We’ll need to train and employ hundreds of thousands of construction workers. At a full-time job creation rate of 2.9 jobs per house, that will mean about 2 million jobs per year. And we’ll need to work with local governments to streamline the approval process. But the estimated additional $7.8 trillion in tax revenues and fees generated by the new housing should sweeten the pot.

We know how to do these things; we just need the will to take them on. Sure, there are lots of details to be ironed out and real costs involved, but there is also real and precisely measurable opportunity in the land all around us. Finding adequate shelter for our families is critical—and a government created by the people and for the people should not hesitate to find ways to put its own buildable land to work.

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead Image: Residential buildings in Tampa, Florida. Credit: DraganSaponjic via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Jacob Frey is an unabashed transplant. While attending law school at Villanova, the Virginia native and professional runner came to Minneapolis to run the Twin Cities Marathon and, as he tells it, fell in love with the city. The day after graduating, he drove the 1,200 miles west to Minneapolis, his chosen home.

He started as an employment and civil rights attorney, became a community organizer, served on the City Council, and was elected mayor in 2017, promptly faced with COVID and the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. He was re-elected in 2021 and continued to address police and race relations, as well as the connections among racial equity, affordability, and zoning.

Senior Fellow Anthony Flint interviewed Frey while visiting Minneapolis for the American Planning Association National Planning Conference. Frey later joined the Lincoln Institute and two other mayors from legacy cities—Aftab Pureval of Cincinnati and Paige Cognetti of Scranton—for a standing-room-only APA panel discussion about what’s working in legacy cities.

The interview, which has been edited for length, can be heard in full on the Land Matters podcast.

Anthony Flint: Minneapolis has been a pioneer in zoning reform and banning single-family-only zoning. How is it going? Can you talk a little bit about whether increasing supply is a good path to affordability?

Jacob Frey: There are two critical paths that you need to take simultaneously to achieve affordability. The first is subsidy. It’s bridging the gap between the market rate and the affordable rate, making sure that people who are experiencing homelessness have that next rung on the ladder to pull themselves out. That side of the equation can’t be achieved simply through supply; it requires some government intervention.

About 10 years ago when I first took office as a city council member, I said very clearly that we were going to go to war on surface parking lots. We were going to dramatically add supply and density, and we did. We coupled that with a comprehensive plan which, as you mentioned, got rid of single-family exclusive zoning, allowing duplexes and triplexes in residential neighborhoods, and then also adding density and height along commercial corridors.

All those things have allowed Minneapolis to keep rents down more than just about any other major city in the country. Other cities were seeing double-digit increases, where we were keeping our rent increases to 1 percent and 2 percent. That’s with a whole lot of new people moving in. We’ve dramatically increased supply and it’s helped a whole lot.

For years, we were operating under these prescriptive zoning ordinances that explicitly said, we’re going to keep the Blacks and the Jews in one portion of the city. When that became illegal to do explicitly, we then started to do the same stuff implicitly through the zoning code, making it so that unless you could own a huge home on a huge parcel, you couldn’t live in huge swaths of the city. The tails of those decisions continued to the present. We wanted to push back on that. We’re going for a diversity of housing options in every neighborhood, and therefore a diversity of people in every neighborhood. In the last three years, we’ve built over 1,000 housing units in multifamily buildings on parcels that previously would only allow a single-family home.

We’ve seen a whole lot of progress . . . and then we got sued. We’re going to ultimately win, whether through legislation or through the litigation itself. Everybody should have that opportunity to live in a great city, and we want to create that opportunity for everyone.

AF: For people outside of Minneapolis, who did you get sued by, and what was the rationale?

JF: We got sued by a group of people who said we were doing something that would harm the environment, and I adamantly disagree. One of the best ways to improve the environment, to reduce your individual carbon output, is by living in a great city. Rather than commuting 45 minutes into work from your own single-family home and picket fence out in the suburbs or exurbs, you can walk to the grocery store and take your bicycle to work. If you do take a car, well, it’s fewer miles traveled anyway. The suit is largely saying that we should have conducted an environmental review on this comprehensive plan and the total potential build-out. Let’s be real here. We can’t assume that every single building downtown is going to be 100 stories tall and every single-family home is going to be a triplex, because that is never going to happen. The way they were asking us to calculate this buildout is not operating in reality.

AF: Turning now to transit and mobility, how are you achieving your vision for sustainable mobility in a historically car-dependent metropolis?

JF: Our city was built out at a time when people were largely dependent on cars. To the extent that it was built out prior to that time period, the streets and the grids were shifted to make them car-centric. Of course, we recognize that cars are a way people get around, but we want to add options so people can safely and comfortably take their bike to work, we want to make it so that pedestrians feel comfortable and in fact are prioritized, we want to add public transportation, not just as an option that’s available occasionally, but as a convenient one for getting from point A to point B.

We are adding bus rapid transit wherever we can. We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in the number of BRT lines, and over the last 15 years, Minneapolis has grown by about 50,000 people, yet the total vehicle miles traveled and gas emissions have gone down.

We recognize that people are going to take cars and we’re going to try to make those cars as sustainable as possible through electric vehicle charging stations. Right now we’re adding bus-specific transit lanes as well so that you can take the bus and whip by traffic that you would otherwise be sitting in.

AF: What is your assessment of land-based financing to fund transit, redevelopment, affordable housing, and parks? The idea is that government action and investments create value in private land and development. Isn’t it possible to harness some portion of that increase in value and plow it back into the community? Are you a value capture fan?

JF: I think it’s not smart to be pro-value capture, pro-TIF, or anti–value capture, anti-TIF. It is a very important tool and needs to be balanced.

There is a way to enhance a city by using tools such as value capture and TIF to achieve wonderful structures and building and transportation options that would not happen but for government intervention. We’ve been using it in a number of different ways, including one of the most popular policy moves I’d say we’ve done in the last few years, which is to knock down this old Kmart. To take you back: 40 or 50 years [ago] there was a policy decision made to block off Nicollet Avenue and put a big Kmart in a huge parking lot in the middle of it.

It would be somewhat unfair of me to question decisions that were made at that time, because I’m sure 40 years from now, there are decisions I will have made that turn out to be not so smart, but this is one of the worst, in my opinion, urban planning decisions that was made in our city. We found ways to get land control over that former Kmart. We are knocking the building down. We’re opening up the street and breathing new life into this important artery and making sure everything is there, from a park to affordable housing to commercial to market rate. It allows the flow of entrepreneurship and new business growth on that corridor to expand south and north. A big part of what we’re using to achieve this large-scale goal is value capture.

It is a tool that should be used, but it’s also a tool that shouldn’t be used every single time there’s a new building that goes up or a new opportunity to be had. It’s got to be a balance.

AF: A task force is looking at changes to the Metropolitan Council, but in what ways is this pioneering arrangement working? Can or should it be replicable, this idea of regional governance?

JF: You can’t think about any city as living in a vacuum. Mayor Carter [of St. Paul] and I joke that it’s not like we just protect the water on our side of the Mississippi River. We share. Likewise, we share an economy that doesn’t end where the street ends and the boundary starts.

I’ve got a responsibility to the city of Minneapolis, and it helps to have a governing body that has a regional focus. We’ve got a Metropolitan Council appointed largely by the governor that helps us put up light rail that goes through a number of different municipalities. It helps us design bus-rapid transit, helps pay for Metropolitan Transit police. To have that regional focus is not just important; it’s crucial to furthering a regional mindset and goal.

AF: What’s your view on skyways? Current urban planning practices suggest a focus on the street and activity at the street level. Is there a conflict there? Tell us a little bit about the urban design part of your job.

JF: If you’ve got 100,000, 200,000 people coming downtown, and you’ve got two levels of activity, you’re splitting whatever number it is between those two levels.Do I like the splitting of activity? Of course I don’t. Nobody does. I’d rather have a concentration of all that bustle and excitement and vibrancy all on one level. But I use the skyways. During the months where it’s cold, I go in and I grab a sandwich and I don’t feel guilty about it. In fact, I’m really pumped to see the small local business owners that are operating in it.

Skyways have been hit particularly hard in the last few years because of a decrease in the number of workers that come downtown on an annual basis. I will not take any more criticism about the lack of vibrancy downtown or somebody’s favorite sandwich shop closing, from the person that’s sitting on their couch at home in the suburbs. If you care, then you should be supporting that sandwich shop.

If you want to see vibrance and want to see more foot traffic, your feet should be adding to that traffic. We are increasing the numbers pretty dramatically right now. People are definitely coming back, but it’s not happening all in one big burst.

AF: It’s become a bit of a cliche, but there really is no substitute for being in the office.

JF: It’s the unplanned interactions that ultimately help. I’m largely in Minneapolis because of a coincidence. You meet somebody, you get a job, you get an interview, you find a great city that you fall in love with. These things only happen because you were there to have it happen to you.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, contributing editor of Land Lines, and author of Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems.

Lead image: Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Credit: Office of Mayor Frey.